Feeling good in a designer bathroom

A Bagno Sasso baththub is not simply for personal hygiene. The swiss design object made of veneer caresses all the senses

The Swiss firm Bagno Sasso managed to create a real show-stopper with its development of a bath veneered with unspoilt, natural wood. The strikingly veneered baths are unique eye-catchers and add really new accents to the modern bathing living space. Each tub is hand-made and therefore becomes an individual one-of-a-kind.

Bathing is great! Especially in your own bath. In ancient times the bath was an imitation pool, a barrel in which you could immerse yourself completely and wash. It was not until much later in the last century that baths acquired a new self-image, namely of also being suitable for relaxing and relieving stress. Today its luxury aspect clearly outweighs other considerations, because our ideas of a hygienic existence are covered by showering.

Bathing is luxury, relaxation, recuperation. Bathing is a pleasure for children, who think up exciting water stories. Bathing can also stimulate the imagination of adults, or can be passionate and even erotic. As we all know, real wood is haptically a particularly attractive material. Real wood always has a warm, supple and velvety effect. It is completely natural and its grown appearance is always unique.

The company, founded in the Grison Alps by Rolf Senti in 1995, has developed into an internationally renowned company, which is today stands for top class, exclusive architecture, interior and product design with its focus on bathrooms and wellness.

The baths made of veneer are made by hand by experts in a time-consuming production process and are only made to order. Such a bath can be made from virtually any wood required. With a high-tech process, the individual veneers are precisely cut with millimetre accuracy and are applied to the respective mould with maximum precision. This means that each veneered bath really does have its very own character.

DESIGNER
Rolf Senti

Bagno Sasso AG, Landquart (Switzerland), was founded in 1995 by the former professional cyclist Rolf Senti and became known for its exclusive wooden baths. Bagno Sasso designs and plans bathrooms, wellness facilities and living concepts.

Interview with Rolf Senti, Founder of Bagno Sasso AG

Baths are usually made of plastics such as acrylic or are made of steel. Why do you make baths out of wood?

Basically, natural materials such as wood have always inspired me. Wood has an unusual touch, look and simply feels good. Baths made of wood create a good atmosphere in a room, they radiate warmth. This aspect is important, especially in modern architecture where so much natural stone and concrete is used. Women often have cold feet, cold hands (laughs); they then feel really cosy in a wooden bath (laughs). And the look …

… is of elementary significance for you as the producer of extravagant lounge bathrooms!?

Sure! With a wooden bath you can also express feelings – for example, our "wooden bathroom shell" is a very soulful element in the bathroom. You don't necessarily have to bath in it every day; you can also get pleasure in simply looking at the bath. Our wooden baths are objets d'art, made by painstaking manual work, with a great deal of love of detail. Each bath is one of a kind, made exactly according to the wishes of the customer. So each customer gets their dream bath.

A bath used to be purely a utilitarian object. Nobody thought of feeling good, of pleasure when they thought of a bath. Attitudes and the expectations in baths have obviously changed?

You can guarantee that we now set completely different standards for baths than was the case thirty or forty years ago. I think an evolution began in the bathroom around fifteen or twenty years ago. Since then, design and look have played a far greater role. Baths far different to the familiar shapes and material are in demand. And we were pioneers in this. We tinkered and tried to place products on the market that weren't known in that form until then…

… and you were successful.

It was the only way for us to survive as a small business. When you start the competition is so large that you have to be much more creative and innovative than the competition in order to survive. But there are no flukes in life (laughs). You simply have to make sure that you find a niche in which you can be successful.